Altering my backend

Sam Hardacre

Those of you with keen eyes will have noticed a few subtle changes have taken place. Those with even keener eyes will see the source code is different giving a big clue about the biggest change that has taken place... I've moved over to WordPress.

For years I've avoided it. My first experience with it back in 2007 wasn't a good one so it was never my CMS of choice. I ran with ExpressionEngine because it's templating system is by far the best way of coding a site up within a CMS. For three or four years it served me well as I dragged my site through various designs and processes, but ultimately it's these processes that caused me to rethink my CMS of choice.

When I first installed EE, I wanted to keep a tight hold on the HTML it produced which resulted in me hand-coding each and every post, even though most consisted of just paragraphs and images. Over the last six months, I've been growing tired of having to code up everything I write and see it as a needless obstacle in my writing process. The version of EE I was running didn't seem to give much in the way of a WYSIWYG editor and upgrading to EE2 wasn't really an option due to the added cost so I looked abroad.

I considered TextPattern for about 30 seconds because it's easy to work with but the admin interface is just horrible and since that's where most of my time would be spent after the initial build, it needed to be a nice place to be. This lead me back to WordPress.

Over the years I have dabbled with it for various projects and although I still find the templating system a minefield of confusion, I've always thought the admin interface is a nice place to work. I've started to port my content across leaving just my photography and book reviews to move over and set up URL redirects before I can uninstall EE then the conversion will be complete. I'll be a WordPress user. I never thought I'd say that again.

So, for the time being at least, it means my blog posts are all templated the same and the art directed pieces have once again disappeared. Once I've let the dust settle, I'll look into re-instating them as they are fun to do but I'm in no real rush to do so. I've enough on my plate at the moment with numerous personal projects on the go without adding that to the mix!

Realign

The change in the backend has also given me a chance to make a few amendments to the design. The overall style and general layout I was happy with but there were just a few things gnawing at my head, namely the measure of the standard content page. It seemed a bit too short for the overall page width so I've extended it slightly. This has meant an alteration to the underlying grid but it turned in my favour as it opened up a few minor customisation options which is a bonus.

I've started to make some alterations to the typography too but I will take my time over this so I can get it as right as possible.

I think I've rambled on enough for one day so I'll leave it there. If you think I'm nuts for moving over or just want to know more about my move, catch me on the Twitters.